Curmudgeonly & Skeptical

"It is often difficult to remember that events that occurred in the far, far distant past were once in the future." - British historian G.M. Trevelyan

   William Tucker [columnist for the New York Sun] presents me with a companion piece to my assertion, below, that American liberals are filthy rotten bastards.  Tucker saw admirable "blame restraint" for two years after 9-11 (I did not), but notes that the barn door is open now.

"Kicking things off last Sunday was the New York Times with a front-page story, "Uneven Response Seen to Terror Risk in Summer '01." Notice the passive verb and indefinite subject. Who sees an uneven response? Why the Times, of course. The story leads with a picture of President Bush on his ranch on August 6. There he is playing cowboy instead being out hunting for Mohammed Atta the way he should have been."

    Which of course is why "40.759724, -73.991826" is programmed into the Terpsboy Strategic Freedom Missile data base as a first strike target.

   The mewling Dick Clarke is celebrated by the Media left for saying, falsely, (how many times does this have to be documented fer chrissake) that he"saw it all coming."  But, there is a real hero who did.

"Steve Emerson is to the media what Richard Clarke was to the government. A former CNN correspondent and senior editor at U.S. News & World Report, he became fanatically concerned about terrorist infiltration after stumbling into a 1992 convention of radical Muslim jihadists in Oklahoma City, of all places."

   Who cares?  Clarke was anti-terrorist czar, Emerson just another bright citizen with no platform, right?

"In 1994 he produced a PBS special, Jihad in America, which brought hysterical criticism from American Muslim groups. A fatwa was issued against him and his picture appeared on the front pages of Arab newspapers."

   Surely the New York Times picked up on this Salman Rushdie redux?  PBS?  CBS?

He had been permanently banned from National Public Radio. He had been permanently banned from CBS news by Dan Rather for initially attributing the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to Muslim terrorists (not a bad guess since that was where he originally encountered jihad groups). The New York Times dismissed his book, Terrorist, calling it "marred by factual errors…and by a pervasive anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias." The Nation accused his PBS special of "creating mass hysteria against American Arabs." In a 1999 profile in Extra, the magazine of the liberal group, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, an unnamed AP Washington editor says, ""We would be very, very, very, very leery of using Steve Emerson."

   So settle down Thursday and prepare to watch Condoleezza Rice raked over the coals by a bunch of politicos and reporters who saw it all coming when she didn't. But after it's all over, let's put Steve Emerson on the stand and ask how many politicians and reporters were listening to his warnings.

    One more thing.  Last night I saw where a British Muslimo leader told his followers that all Muslims were at war with the West, even British Muslims.  See, I execute that sonofabitch on live television, 1 hour later, for inciting, treason, you-name-it.  They did not.  Why?  Because the Muslim press would holler?  Because The Nation would object?  Sheesh.